OPINION:
The liberals among us, who now call themselves “progressives,” having blighted the old and honored word “liberal,” are a curious lot. They make contradictory and illogical arguments to advance their wishes and dreams and dismiss those who disagree as wrong-headed, racist or worse.
President Obama exemplifies these tendencies and instincts. His disdain for the dead white Europeans who discovered and settled this land has been part of his Columbus Day message for years. He concedes that Christopher Columbus and his shipmates were a brave lot — he doesn’t want to unduly offend Italian-American voters — but he makes clear that deep down he believes that the red men who occupied this land before the Europeans arrived would have been better served if the Santa Maria had been lost at sea.
The men and women who followed Columbus settled the wild country, wrote a Constitution the likes of which the world had never seen and built the greatest and most successful nation in history, did in fact “take” the land they found from those already here. That’s what refugees often do.
With this history and Mr. Obama’s reading of it, his Thanksgiving Day message was tone deaf. For all his spoken eloquence, Barack Obama has never listened to the music of America. Perhaps he does not hear it. In his Thanksgiving message, he likens the Syrian refugees he wants to resettle here to the Pilgrims, who celebrated the first Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims and those who followed transformed the land they found, a largely empty continent waiting for them. Mr. Obama’s Syrian refugees will not find an empty continent.
The Europeans and Indians who struggled for control of the New World three centuries ago found coexistence impossible. Their cultures were too different. When Tecumseh, chief of the Shawnee, sat with William Henry Harrison on a log to discuss the possibility of peace and coexistence, he kept sliding toward Harrison and forcing him to the edge of the log. Harrison, about to be pushed off the log, said “Chief, there doesn’t seem to be room enough here for both of us.” Tecumseh looked him in the eye and said “My point, exactly.”
There’s room enough here for many more who aspire to be Americans, but there’s no room at all for those who would destroy the society and culture they are asking to take them in. The president is correct that most of the Syrians seeking asylum are victims, not terrorists, but wrong to dismiss the probability that some of them are ISIS-trained warriors. The FBI can vet them, the president says, but the director of the FBI doubts it. Mr. Obama’s own chief of Homeland Security says that such vetting usually requires two years to clear an asylum seeker. Mr. Obama doesn’t want to make anyone to wait two years. He wants to open the gates to thousands now and we can hope for the best.
The danger is real and those who see the danger are neither frivolous nor racist. Germany has welcomed thousands of Syrian and other refugees and Georg Massen, head of the German Federal Police, says that 8,000 of them are suspected “combat hardened professionals” sent to Germany by ISIS.
A handful of terrorists brought Paris to its knees and at least one them arrived in France as an asylum-seeking refugee. The president seems not to have considered the carnage a few hundred ISIS fighters can wreak here. His first responsibility is to protect the nation and the people who live here. To do less is shirking his duty.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.